CONTENTdm Featured Collections: June 2013

Organizations worldwide are using CONTENTdm digital collection management software to create thousands of outstanding digital collections and to provide easy access to their unique holdings.

This month, four collections from the CONTENTdm Collection of Collections are featured on the OCLC website. The featured collections for June are the Szathmary Recipe Pamphlet Digital Collection, the Light Work Permanent Collection, Paintings from the Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery, and The Historic Landscape of Nevada: Development, Water, and the Natural Environment.

Louis Szathmary (1919-1996) was a Hungarian-born chef, restaurateur, and food writer best known as proprietor of The Bakery restaurant in Chicago. Szathmary amassed one of the largest culinary archives in the United States, a portion of which is housed at the University of Iowa Libraries. The University's collection includes more than 4,000 promotional recipe pamphlets, published mainly by food and appliance manufacturers and trade associations. Dating from the late 19th century to the present, this advertising ephemera reflects the evolution of the modern American diet. Of particular interest is the time period from 1880-1930, when industrialization gave rise to the modern food industry. The result was a dramatic change in the American diet, driven by an ever-expanding market of products. This digital collection contains a representative sampling of pamphlets from that era.

This collection of more than 2,100 works of art consists primarily of photographs made by artists who have participated in Light Work's Artist-in-Residence program or received Light Work Grants. The photographs in this collection include both color and black and white photographic prints, alternative processes, as well as computer generated imagery, collages, artist books, and installation pieces.

The Young Collection of paintings was given to Scripps College by General and Mrs. Edward Clinton Young in 1946. The majority of the works in the collection are in the Impressionist style and were painted by well-renowned American and European masters, including Mary Cassatt, George Inness, Winslow Homer, and Theodore Robinson. The Youngs developed their extraordinary collection while living in the eastern United States. Their goal was to include high quality, representative work by the best American painters active during the period 1870-1930.

The LSTA-grant funded digital collection, Historic Landscape of Nevada, documents the historic role of water resource management in Southern Nevada, from the natural springs that attracted the earliest inhabitants and travelers, to the wells that supported early town development, to the massive federal reclamation projects that dammed the Colorado River to irrigate the California and Arizona deserts. This project contains over 1200 digitized items, including technical reports that are available in UNLV’s Institutional Repository. This collection also brings together photographs, maps, letters, contracts, charts, and postcards. Additionally, this collection contains several primary source sets designed to immediately connect educators with historical materials. These sets can be used to supplement teaching in a wide range of disciplines.